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Clean install of Windows 11 Home with two drives

Hi all. After my last post I made just over a year ago about Windows managing to trap me in the Insider Program’s dev channel even though I myself only ever clicked beta, I’m finally at the point where I’d like to get my OS back to normal. I’ve tried researching it online but can’t seem to get any concrete answers, so I figured I’d come here.

I have one 256GB SSD, on which Windows is installed and boots from, and one 1TB HDD (which has most games and basically everything else).

My questions are:

-To reverse the changes made by the dev channel to my drives’ partitions, will I need to reset both my SSD and my HDD? Or will I need to reset only the SSD, and be able to leave everything on the HDD untouched?

-Where do the system files added or changed by the dev channel exist on my PC? Are they in Windows’ folders, such as System32?

-and somewhat related to the last question, could I backup all of my SSD’s files before the clean install, and simply drag and drop them back over the new Windows installation, without breaking the installation or having to reinstall programs?

Just wanting to make sure I do this as thoroughly and safely as possible, since I’ve used and tweaked this PC almost daily for the past 3 and a half years.

Thanks!

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Answer
Answer

I'm sorry to tell you that there is almost no way to make a smooth transition to the stable version via a clean install.

For your first question, you don't have to! All you have to do is wipe the partition where your system is (e.g. C, which is used as the system partition by default) and put the new system there.

The answer to your second question is that insider builds use the same default directory structure as stable releases, and by default all system data is stored in the same place as the stable release (unless the insider release changes a relevant feature).

The answer to your third question is that if you back up everything to disk and restore it, you will simply overwrite the stable release with the insider release. Insider builds don't run a new system in a container, they directly modify the system you're currently using-in other words, you can't rip it off. If you don't want to reinstall the software (as you said, they're not on the system partition, so they're not wiped), you might consider backing up the relevant registry and restoring it after the installation is complete - admittedly, this is tedious and has some risks. So reinstalling the software to restore the correct registry is still the recommended approach.

Hope this helps!

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Caozhi L.
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Answer
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Yes.

Some applications that store configuration files in the registry and in environment variables may still lose some configuration items, requiring you to redeploy those configurations.

Be sure to back up all your important files on the system partition (including user directories if you have not moved them to other partitions), as they will be lost after a clean install.

Hope this helps!

---
Caozhi L.
Volunteer Moderator & Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador
---
Please mark my reply as an answer by clicking "Yes" if it helps.
---
I'm not a Microsoft Employee.
---
Timezone: UTC +8

1 person found this reply helpful

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Last updated May 17, 2024 Views 58 Applies to: